WINTER – Transformation | Intervention

Foto: Oliver Möst

For a short time snow covers areas in the city. The snow hides traces and at the same time enables new traces to be traced and tracks to be laid. In the space that has turned white, many things are transformed into a new visibility: In the snow, the city becomes more stage-like. This temporary state of the city plays a practical and metaphorical role in the artists’ actions. The places that the artists have chosen are peripheries, in-between spaces and places with a historical symbolic power. Against the wintry background, the artists question and reflect on claims to power and representation of the places.

The winter cold sublimely reflects the social coldness of historical, political and urbanistic appropriations and exclusions.

The artist Stefka Ammon films the former patrol strip on the outer wall of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and traces the path along which a relative of hers went on duty during National Socialism  [Neutral Zone, 2007].
The smudged footprints on the sparsely snowed-in path seem like absent witnesses of the place that can never be neutral. The emptiness of the path, the wintry sky, and the landscape that Ammon focuses on becomes a plane of reflection for the question of the human.

[…]

The video series “Winter Video Fenster” selected by Oliver Möst shows critical views of visible and invisible structures in the city and leads to the question of how we want to live in cities.

Exhibition text (excerpt) by Dr. Birgit Szepanski

Foto: Oliver Möst

More about the work “Neutrale Zone” part of the project “The moose on the ice” here.